AI, Youth, and the Disappearing First Job

Entry-level jobs used to be the bridge between education and a real pay cheque. Now AI can do in seconds what many graduates were hired to do in their first year, from scanning articles to summarising reports and producing basic analysis. On Youth Day in South Africa, we sit with what that shift means for young people across the continent, especially in a country facing some of the highest youth unemployment in the world. 

We start with a global signal: students walking out during a tech leader’s commencement speech, a public expression of uncertainty about the future of work. From there, we unpack the deeper risk: the traditional poverty reduction pathway of education, skills, entry-level job, then career growth is being disrupted. That is why ideas like universal basic income keep resurfacing, and why we need to talk honestly about what happens when the “first job” becomes harder to find. 

We also look at what South Africa is already doing through the National Youth Policy 2020 to 2030 and the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, and why programme design matters as much as programme volume. Then we explore models and lessons from abroad, including large-scale shifts towards digital skills and a culture of lifelong learning. We bring it back home with a practical challenge: building skills-based pathways, widening access to learning platforms, and pushing corporates to play a real role in exposing young people to relevant tools as they adapt to an AI economy. 

If you care about youth development, economic growth, entrepreneurship, and a future-ready workforce in Africa, listen, share it with someone building their career, and leave a review. What skill do you think should be prioritised first for young people right now?

Watch on YouTube on: https://www.youtube.com/@mmathebezvobwo

Transcript

Youth Day And The AI Shock

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Ignition Zone Podcast. I am so excited to be sharing this reflection with you this youth day in South Africa. And for me, the work that we do will always center around how do we tackle some of the most difficult challenges in a rapidly changing world. And of course, artificial intelligence is that world or it's creating that sense of change in this world. So for me, it is an exciting opportunity to reflect on how we think about youth development on the continent and in South Africa, especially because Africa is home to one of the youngest populations in the world, and it is going to persist. Welcome to the Ignition Zone, your go-to podcast where we ignite ideas, spark transformation, and fuel the journey to unlocking Africa's economic potential. I am your host, Matebet Shopper, and I'm so excited to take you on this incredible adventure into the world of economic development, entrepreneurship, and career groups.

Why Graduates Fear The Future

SPEAKER_00 1:18

So as we tackle this conversation, I want us to really start somewhere. Not necessarily in Johannesburg or Rwanda or whatever else or Nairobi. I want us to think about what happened recently in Stanford University in the United States, where university students walked out during or staged a walkout during the Google CEO's commencement speech. This gives you a clue in terms of the worry and the uncertainty that they are thinking about in a world where they've just graduated from one of the top universities in the world, and yet they're facing a reality in which entry jobs, and yet they're facing a reality in which entry jobs are narrowing. They're narrowing at an alarm rate because of the fact that it is now easier for certain tasks to be done more productively and even more efficiently by artificial intelligence. So reports can be read and summarized in minutes. What used to be, for example, an entry job to do market research, as an example, searching and crawling the web or reading a bunch of articles and highlighting and making notes. What used to be available to a young person is now no longer available because the same reports can be reliterally pulled from at a click or at a small with a small prompt, they can be pulled and summarized from you know large language models like uh ChatGPT and others in a matter of seconds. So, of course, these young people are concerned about the ability to enter into the workplace and increasingly finding it harder and harder to do that.

Universal Basic Income And Poverty Pathways

SPEAKER_00 3:12

So that's the four first point of reference that I want us to look at. The other is a conversation, one that doesn't happen too often anymore, but one that used to happen quite a lot between uh among uh tech billionaires and recently trillionaires, which is that as the world evolves and as artificial intelligence stretches in terms of its phase and scope and ability, we're going to find that more and more people have to be on universal basic income. And so that is a conversation that really is one that we should all be paying attention to, but most importantly, has an ability to disrupt the nature of poverty reduction as we know it. And I'll give you a formula. For some of us, this is where some of us, how some of us have managed to come from smaller households and have been able to find economic um progress. Essentially, the formula really for getting out of poverty used to really be a straight one. Have access to education, skills, have an entry-level job that then you're able to build your career upon and earn. However, with the advent of artificial intelligence and the way in which the manner in which these entry-level jobs are becoming inaccessible, and the manner in which education in itself is quite complex and becoming disrupted, it's becoming clear that this formula is no longer a safe pass or that we need to really rethink it and think about how nations like South Africa, which boast one of the highest unemployment or youth unemployment in the world, need to approach

South Africa’s Youth Policies Under Strain

SPEAKER_00 5:05

this. So currently, South Africa has many programs and um and many uh policies that try and address um this challenge in a predictable manner. And one such policy is the National Youth Policy of 2020 to 2030, which recognizes the importance of education, skills development, entrepreneurship, and economic uh participation. The other is the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, which is specifically designed to strengthen pathways from learning to earning. So these policies exist, and government is increasingly uh utilizing you know um programs such as learnerships to get young people into workplaces. However, the challenge with this is or the challenge with these interventions is that typically they are very much um in a they're very much done from a compliance perspective, they're not done with meaning in mind, and lastly, young people don't really get the skills that they need to navigate their careers or to even start meaningful businesses, and hence high youth unemployment continues to persist.

New Models For Skills And Work

SPEAKER_00 6:25

So, what are the important uh models that we can sort of look at? You know, yesterday, as I was reading, I came across a post that says China has completely overhauled uh about 12,000 degrees or learning uh pathways because they are increasingly wanting to redirect their youth to digital skills, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, etc. So, one of the key things that we should be doing in our various countries is to really look at which degrees will be relevant, which learning skills will be relevant, or learning pathways will be relevant, and redirect young people to those pathways. Um, the other day I was watching a podcast by the Financial Times, and they were talking about how because these jobs are increasingly uh entry jobs are increasingly disappearing, they have found a mechanism in which young people can be attached to an organization with no payment whatsoever, but with the idea that whatever skills that they came into would be enhanced and made relevant to the ever fast changing world. And that definitely provides a pathway for young people. And of course, South Africa is quite unique in a sense that young people already are facing poverty um constraints in terms of access to you know uh healthcare, um, you know, food and so on. And so the question really remains: would young people actually get into these programs without being paid? However, what matters the most, I think, is to be able to think about an environment where the skills that emerge from those programs actually future-proof those young people more than the current sort of um stipend-led learnership programs that also have various compliance factors attached to it. So that's one model. Um, Singapore offers a similar model in a sense that they embrace the idea that learning does not stop at graduation, and so workers, all workers are encouraged to continuously acquire new skills throughout their careers. This lesson is powerful in a sense that it builds a culture of lifelong learning. Now, I think that the African continent as a whole is a lifelong learning engine or machine, in a sense that if you look at our ability to learn new dances, to uh put out content from a creative perspective, what I do think we need to do from an education perspective is harness that ability and create inculcate that culture. That you know, there are multiple learning platforms that are free in instances, some instances, and others you only pay after you get a degree. We need to be able to get a message out there to young people that no skill from a digital perspective is too small, that we don't need to have a certificate to recognize that skill. But what matters the most is that it's a relevant skill in terms of from an economic strategy perspective

Creative Destruction And Competitive Advantage

SPEAKER_00 9:55

and an execution perspective, and therefore encourage at a global massive scale this culture of lifelong learning in terms of skills that are relevant. Now, the question is how do we get to the answer of what skills are relevant in the first place? You know, I have a master's in entrepreneurship and I'm a big, big supporter of the Shampetarian worldview, which is that capitalism creates what we call creative destruction in the sense that from an innovation perspective, new innovations create a new uh equilibrium by destroying what was um what was previously known. For example, if you think about um the advent of electricity, which then destroys you know using fire to fuel certain activities, that destroys that but creates a new equilibrium in terms of efficiency and convenience. The same applies to artificial intelligence, and actually the same applies to how we think about economic strategy from a country perspective, that our economic strategy should really be to do a couple of things. One it is to find our competitive advantage or our yeah, our point where we excel, and one of that is actually young people, we are the youngest uh population in the world, and we are projected to grow that population, whereas countries like Japan are aging and other China is even aging as well, and so that becomes a source of competitive advantage. And then, secondly, the key thing is how do we make sure that the creativity that we have, the ability for young people to produce content at scale is harnessed as part of that competitive strategy, and then thirdly, how do we make sure that we look at all the uh centers of excellence and pockets of excellence that exist in the country from artificial intelligence perspective, and how do we make sure that we bring all of these elements together to create a competitive economic strategy? If you think about textiles or clothing as an example, there's a way that which harnessing, you know, and this is just me thinking out loud, there's a way in which we can harness the creativity of young people and the technology aspect of it to create completely new intelligent clothes that are that are fit for purpose in our African context, in terms of our weather, in terms of climate change, and so on. And so we need to be thinking about firstly economic strategy at that level, but then secondly, making sure that we power young people uh in terms of having access to multiple learning pathways, you know, whether it is a skill that they pick up on a platform like Coursera, whether we create our own Coursera, um, and that actually entry jobs we need to think of them in terms of not gatekeeping that those entry jobs need to have certain accreditation, it should really be about skills level-based uh recruitment. And then lastly, corporates really need to rally around young people, exposing them to the most relevant skills as they themselves adapt to this new environment.

The Big Question And Closing

SPEAKER_00 13:31

So, those are my reflections on youth day, and in closing, I really do want us to further reflect on this that that pathway from education to skills development to earning, you know, your first entry job and earning and ultimately to coming, you know, escaping poverty is actually being disrupted. How do we think about models that are agile enough, that are responsive enough and efficient enough to address the crisis that we face from a youth unemployment perspective, but also give us a competitive advantage? Thank you for joining this episode. I look forward to your thoughts as well. But uh stay tuned and in the future.